The two weeks passed all too quickly, and before I knew it I was back in Nha Trang—plotting, typing, monitoring, briefing, and filing. The boring routine would be broken once more before the end of my tour.
“Pack it up! We’re moving, lock, stock, and barrel,” Sergeant Fallow yelled. “And I mean on the double!”
It was early afternoon on the first day of November, and we were assembled in our downtown TOC as he and “Quick Draw” McDawe, returning from an emergency session with the colonel’s staff, charged through the door.
“Big fight going on in Saigon, maybe throughout the country,” Major McDawe, our operations officer, said, stuffing papers from his desk into a laundry bag. “Nobody knows what’s happening, but we’re moving to Long Van. No security here in Nha Trang, and we don’t want to get caught in the middle of this thing… uh… whatever it is.”
Of course Quick Draw, and most of the rest of us, knew there was more to it than that. We had been told throughout the summer months of the possibility of a coup, and we knew that President Ngo Dinh Diem’s palace guard, perhaps the only force that might remain loyal to him in the event of a coup, was the LLDB, Vietnam’s Special Forces and our counterparts. And that was what we didn’t want to get caught in the middle of.
Within a matter of minutes, we had everything loaded on trucks and were on our way to Long Van, where we set up operations in our alternate TOC, a sandbagged bunker. We stayed there for the next thirty-six hours or so as events in Saigon unfolded. Although we received some information from MACV (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam) and our Saigon liaison element, most of the news came to us via AP/ UPI teletype. Midday on the second day, the teletype printed out a message stating that the president and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, had committed “accidental suicide”—rather difficult to do with one’s hands wired behind one’s back.
The celebrations then began, and for the next several days an atmosphere of controlled anarchy prevailed throughout most of the country, especially in the larger cities. The celebrations would not last long, however. By every measurable standard—economically, politically, and most assuredly militarily—the country’s fortunes would quickly take a turn for the worse. But by then I was on my long-awaited journey back home, to the land of round doorknobs and the big PX.
10. Fort Bragg, North Carolina: January 1964
Returning from that first stint in the Nam, I reported to the Fifth Special Forces at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, as ordered, only to discover I’d been reassigned in transit. My next stop was Infantry Officer’s Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia, from which I was commissioned a second lieutenant of infantry the following June. After OCS, I reported back to the Fifth Special Forces, whose group adjutant welcomed me with open arms.
“Got great news for you, Lieutenant. We’re on our way to Vietnam! Whole group’s going. We’re replacing all the A teams from Okinawa and the Seventh. Gonna be strictly a Fifth Group show from now on Assigning you to detachment A-104. Team’s in predeployment now, presently conducting area studies.” Then, after picking up a red-bordered folder stamped Secret and studying it a moment, he uttered his frightening pronouncement. “Your team’s going into the northwestern part of the country. Place called ARO. Hummmm, never heard of it myself.”
Oh, no! I have!
11. ARO, Vietnam: January 1965
“Lieutenant, it beats the shit out of me why it’s called ARO,” Sergeant Grimshaw said grumpily but not unkindly. He was a senior sergeant of the Okinawa-based Special Forces detachment that had occupied this desolate hilltop for the past six months, a sergeant who was obviously anxious—as indeed was his entire team—to put both name and place behind him as quickly as possible.
“Don’t even know what the word means, if it means anything. Hell, maybe it’s Viet meaning ‘forsaken,’ or French for ‘wilderness.” Or maybe it’s Katu for ‘white man’s folly.” That would be more appropriate. No, sir, don’t know why it’s called ARO, and don’t care. But I do know if those numbnuts in Nha Trang expect you all to spend a fucking year on this hill, your whole team will be ‘looney tunes’ time you rotate! Hell, we’ve only been here half that time, and ain’t none of us quite right anymore. If we had to spend a year in this shithole, if you all weren’t replacing us now, we’d go bugfuck, completely bugfuck!”
“That bad, huh?” I said, standing next to him atop a bunker in my brand-new “been-in-Vietnam-all-day” jungle fatigues, the two of us overlooking the hilltop Sergeant Scuggs had so graphically described to Chester and me two years previously.
“Yeah, that bad. Listen, sir, you got briefings on this place at Nha Trang and Danang… uh… camp’s mission, surveillance strategy, and so forth, right?”
I nodded.
“Well, don’t believe a fucking word of it! I’ll give you the real skinny. First of all, our mission is interdiction, stop the flow of troops, arms, and supplies along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, right?”
He paused, so again I nodded.
“Well, know how many troops we’ve stopped in the past six months? One! And I’m not so sure he wasn’t just some poor Katu tribesman who got caught napping. Know how many arms and supplies we’ve quote, interdicted?”
I shook my head.
“None! Zero! Know why? ‘Cause of that fucking jungle out there. See, the concept is—and I’m sure one of Nha Trang’s little Napoleons told you this—we ‘aggressively’ patrol the area between us and the camps at Kham Duc and Ta Ko. Bullshit! If you took off overland today, you wouldn’t reach either of ’em ‘fore Christmas. You measure a day’s walking in that jungle in meters, not klicks.”
He paused, evidently collecting his thoughts, then continued, “And what about your strike force? See, the concept was to recruit the force from the indigenous Montagnard population, in our case, the Katu. Well, sir, I ain’t never seen a Katu, much less recruited one. ‘Cause the Katu, he’s not like your Rhade or Jarai ‘sign-me-up-for-a-can-of-rock-salt’ Montagnard you got down south. He don’t want nothing to do with nobody. Oh, he’s out there, out there in that jungle. We run ‘cross one of his hutches every now and then, but he’s never at home. Don’t have them tribal, you know, communitylike instincts other ‘Yards have. Usually it’s just him and his family, maybe two, three families, always on the move.”
He paused, again as if he had lost his train of thought. Then he said,
“Anyway, there’s no way we’re gonna enlist the Katu in our border surveillance program, right?”
“Suppose not,” I replied.
“so Danang’s mayor,” he went on as if not hearing me, “him having his own problems with an overpopulated prison system, says, ‘Hey, you looking for aggressive, tough young fighters for your strike force? I got ’em by the truckload.” And that, sir, is your strike force.” He motioned toward an adjacent area of the camp where several of these soldiers were moving about in the late afternoon sun, two of them engaged in a heated argument over what appeared to be a can of Del Monte peaches.
“Pickpockets, petty thieves, beggars… shit, rapists and murderers for all I know. Perfect place for ’em. They can’t desert; there’s no place to go.”
“Well, can they fight?” I asked. “I mean, are they good soldiers?”
“No on the latter, and beats the shit out of me on the former. Like I said, we ain’t seen a lot of fighting. But on the other hand, guess maybe the answer’s yes, ‘cause they shoot one another every now and then. Uh… mostly as a result of gambling arguments. They play a lot of cards—not much else to do with their pay what with there being no village, or women, or booze, or anything else ‘round here to spend it on. And you can’t let ’em go back to Danang on leave to spend it. Shit, you’d never see ’em again.”